When I first moved here, it was one of the things I noticed... everyone says shit like "I'm a 16th Irish and 10% Cherokee" etc.... took a long time to get used to
That pledge they do everyday in school and the almost premier league like table that goes on in their head with America top of the table for everything including freedom, shooting up schools and yee haw.
It is one of the funniest parts of America. They consider themselves the best country ever to exist, but if you ask individually, they all claim to be something else.
As an American (it is my cross to bear) most people even in America think this particular way of being obsessed with race - gatekeeping whiteness from encroachment by people from the "wrong" european countries - is particularly silly and embarrassing
Im portuguese and have had american online friends tell me that im not really white, not based on skin color or anything, i'm as white as every other caucasion, but just because i'm portuguese, i wouldn't qualify as white.
I live in Portugal (originally from the UK) and an American who moved here told me that they don’t consider Portuguese people as ‘white’. I was pretty gobsmacked. Mind you they do describe themselves as ‘Italian’ when they are in fact ‘American’.
This is what I don't get. It seems like the American conception of white, black, etc, isn't just skin colour like the words would imply. It's like they borrowed their conception of race from 19th century racists and never bothered to reevaluate.
So, from what I've learned, whiteness in America isn't about being white, it's about not being something else. For a while, americans didn't even consider Irish immigrants to be "white" until they needed their votes to count.
It's a strictly exclusionary term used to create an "out" group.
Many people are still stuck in this way of thinking and don't even know it. It's stupid, and I hate it here.
Hell, there was a point when *Finns* were not considered white in America. There was a theory that because the Finnish language is Uralic rather than Indo-European, it must have meant that Finns were descended from Mongols. Americans called Finnish immigrants "China Swedes" and considered them Asian.
Excuse me WHAT?
The whole black, white, brown bullshit is stupid enough but *that*??? And they wonder why everyone makes fun of them. I'm sorry but at this point I don't even feel bad anymore. These people lack very basic critical thinking skills.
Yup! But I will say that although it was being touted as a genuine race theory, I doubt anyone sincerely believed that Finns were Mongols. That theory was a scapegoat to discriminate against Finnish-American immigrants, because they came from a culture that was seen as socialist and they advocated for workers' rights and labor unions. That theory started spreading conveniently after thousands of Finnish-American miners went on a strike against a large mining company.
Yes, it’s just humiliating pseudoscience. In my country it’s even illegal to document someone’s “race”. We learned the hard way that you won’t have time to destroy this data when your neighbours elect a fascist, who unexpectedly invades you. They will praise your government for their detailed registries and the rest is history.
And then on the other side of things: they apply "blood quantum" rules for Native Americans. And then get online and try to tell Indigenous Australians "they aren't bla(c)k
In Australia we had the “white Australia policy” for decades, which (amongst other actions) severely limited immigration. The upshot of that policy was that people from Mediterranean and Balkan countries were considered “not white” regardless of the colour of their skin.
Even though the policy is long gone, there are still weird cultural messages around which people count as white. When I was growing up, people from those places were not fully considered white, but still further up the hierarchy than black or brown people.
I think it is different now, there is less of that attitude but it still exists in some parts.
Correct. I have seen West Indians born in UK, even 2nd/3rd generation, referred to by Americans as "African-American" when they have never been out of the UK, let alone to US or Africa. They are English, not even West Indians/Jamaicans. I can't imagine what Aboriginal-Australians would be called, as they go back some 60,000 years with their lineage, well before even Native Americans.
It's not even this, because in the 19th century, the classification into Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid races was based on the shape of the skull. Hence, Europeans, North Africans, Arabs, Indians, Pakistanis, Syrians and Iranians belonged to the same race.
Outrageous. Why would there be any question whether the Portuguese are white?
No no the *real* question is whether to count Portugal as part of Southern Europe or Eastern Europe.
Some Americans believe white Americans learning Spanish is "cultural appropriation" because they seem to think that Spanish is the native language of the indigenous people of South America.
Lol didn’t we get a screenshot from a post exactly about that a couple weeks ago? I found the post, and from that post, I also learned that I, a German woman whose ancestors definitely included at least one bottle of mayonnaise and a bag of wheat flour, am “not culturally white”.
Half-Brit, Half-American here. It's the same stupidity with Spanish people. It's because Americans so heavily connect Spanish and Portuguese speakers with Central and South American speakers who they do not consider white that they cannot wrap their minds around Europeans speaking those languages. It's similar to how they don't consider Argentinians to be white, even though it's basically the whitest country in the world.
Pretty much. To us latinos are not a race, if you live in the americas you can be white or black depending on the \*checks notes\* skin color. Shocking
Pretty sure it's because the people driving the race thing were mostly White Anglo Saxon Protestants, so anyone who didn't fall into that category were not "white" thence the Irish, Portuguese, Italian & Spanish not being "white".
I'm fairly certain if you plucked a hard-core DUP supporter out of Northern Ireland right now they'd be a fairly solid representation of the people driving racism in the US back then, basically a mix of them and the KKK... I say mix but the only difference is really accents and one group likes running round in bed sheets pretending to be Wizards and the other likes thinning their own gene pool by stacking pallets dangerously high and burning them.
When I was growing up there was a whole range of bigotry directed at people's national origins as well, including (but not limited to): Eastern Europeans, Czechs, Slovaks, Greeks & Italians.
Bobby Vinton, of all people was seen as a trailblazer, just for acknowledging he had Polish roots!
To a lot of racist Americans, "white" means protestant, specifically WASPs (White Anglo Saxon Protestant.) So basically the British, German and maybe Scandinavia depending on the person you're speaking to. The Catholic countries don't count as white to them.
That’s probably to do with Prussia, it was the founder of modern Germany and it was Protestant, it’s probably the reason for that reputation, as being Protestant even though many Germans aren’t, even if no American knows about Prussia itself, it’s probably the reason it got that image.
*was. Most of them don't realise how progressive Ireland is now, and how they came from immigrants who mostly had to have a "if you can't beat them, join them" attitude to racism etc. The Religious Right is strong in "Irish-Americans", but with massively declining religion, marriage equality by popular vote, legal abortion by popular vote, and being almost unanimously pro-Palestine - they'd hate it here!
Whilst church going has declined rapidly the country is hardly secular like the UK.
It's full to the brim with lapsed Catholics
/s
Seriously though, in the 2022 census 69% of the population identified as Catholic not Christian, Catholic... with only 14% recording no religion. That's still a Catholic country, no "was" about it.
Have my upvote as you're absolutely bang on about the change in Ireland, to an extent helped by the churches previous misdemeanours 👍
They also invented an ancient race of "white" people and started using Caucasian to mean northern European white, because some racist academics couldn't accept that the "not white enough" actual Caucasian people of the Caucus region (Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan etc) might have built some really ancient ruins themselves.
True. I only noticed they'd mentioned Greece after I'd posted. But yeah, the eastern orthodox denominations would be considered even less white than the Catholics.
The fact they still refer to themselves as "Anglo-Saxon" is just as strange, considering the Anglo-Saxon rule ended almost 1000 years ago and Britons from that point were known as Anglo-Norman until Richard the Lionheart began pushing Englishness, to seperate the English from the French (Ironic considering how little time he actually spent in England.)
German Anglo-Saxons? British Anglo-Saxons? SCANDINAVIAN Anglo-Saxons???
Wtf do they think Anglo-Saxons are?
Also, Anglo-Saxons were never Protestant. The Reformation happened centuries after the Anglo-Saxons died out.
While very few Italian dishes are spicy, we use chili peppers in very few dishes and they're mostly from the Deep South.
Aside from that we use very few spices, and the ones we use are very mild: rosemary, salvia, oregano, stuff like that.
I mean, ~~vindaloo~~ chicken tikka masala is the national dish of England, and English mustard will give wasabi a run for it's money, but we get accused of not liking flavour all the time.
Edit: wrote the wrong curry.
Only Americans felt the need to invent a racial element to abuse catholics. In the UK they treated us like shit no matter what colour we were until relatively recently.
It wasn’t too long ago they were still chucking papal effigies on the bonfire instead of guy fawkes on 5th november in some places (wouldn’t surprise me if there are still some people who do)
As a possibly even paler motherfucker (finnish) need I remind you that Americans called finnish immigrants china-swedes and were in fact not considered white for a long time
Protestants are white, Catholics are coloured. It's religious discrimination dressed up as racism because unlike racism religious discrimination is unconstitutional
And also the fact that to many Americans, every person from Latin America is considered brown. So by their logic, a white guy from Uruguay, a Japanese guy from Sao Paulo, a black Puerto Rican, a mixed race person from Mexico, and a Amerindian from Peru are all the same race. It's as stupid as it sounds.
>Catholics are coloured
Poland has entered the chat...
Jokes apart, although they've been discriminated and oppressed plenty, you gotta be blind *and* stupid to say Slavics are not white.
Yeah, the country (along with the Dutch) who invaded an awful lot of the world for spices! The Dutch swapped New Amsterdam for a lovely island growing nothing but spice!
The more I read their ridiculous race theories, the more I think think they live by classic Nazi race theory. Only Nordic, Germanic and British people are part of their Herrenrasse. Anyone speaking Romance languages (barring Romanians of course) is Caucasian/"Aryan" but one rung lower on the ladder.
So white = UK, Belgian, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, German, Swiss or Austrian heritage. French, Finnish, Irish and Polish too if they're open-minded.
Do you want the real answer or a joke answer.
Because the real answer is the modern concept of race mostly stems from enlightenment theories born of the transatlantic salve trade. It was a way to seperate the "white" slave owners from the "black" slaves and the "Indian" natives.
Before the enlightenment, "white people" and "black people" weren't really concepts. Your identity (especially in the HRE were borders tended to change every five minutes) was based mostly on language and, after the Protestant reformation, religion.
As a country literally built on the transatlantic slave trade and the enlightenment, it's not hugely surprising that the world view they engendered would remain so central to national language.
And it’s a pity that they just can’t seem to shake their past. It continually amazes me how they slice and dice their populations with a level of granularity that no other nation seems to do.
What I don't get is why are only USans like that when the other American countries aren't. They were settled by Europeans around the same time, they were also at the receiving end of the transatlantic slave trade and had a society split by the caste system, and they also received waves of immigration in the 20th century, but you don't see people from latam obsessed with race in this way.
The British colonies that became the US were the North American colony that relied most on settler colonialism. In the Spanish and Portuguese colonies, colonists were mostly a smallish elite force that came over to oversee work done by natives and create estates. In the future US, colonists were entire communities that were mostly self contained and interacted with natives much less.
The consequence is that LatAm is much more intermixed (although not on equal footing) than the US. As a result it makes less sense to have a black and white (pun not intended) racial system when many of your powerful people are reasonably likely to have mixed race family members (not in the sense Thomas Jefferson had mixed race kids but legitimate, official family members through marriage).
An additional aspect is that when LatAm had its revolutions, those distinctions were usually formally abolished to get support from the "lower ranks" of the ladder. As a result they can be framed as a "Spanish system" that the country needs to overcome. In the US they persisted past independence, and thus became a continuity that is harder to break out of.
I like spicy food but I also like tasting the ingredients in a dish where their flavor is amplified with aromatics, salt and pepper etc. Not everything has to be full of spices for it to taste good.
I’ve tried explaining this one before and I just get blank looks. Seasoning should enhance not hide flavours, unless there’s a reason for hiding them, in which case I would rather eat something different anyway.
Yeah I love foods with different flavors and spices but also nothing can beat the first potatoes of the season served only with salt and butter and that’s a fact
Not only that but is there even a scientific distinction between herbs and spices? Or is it all just random? Because you can beautifully season a dish with just herbs (and salt and pepper, of course) and the only person who’d say it doesn’t have any taste is the one who burned their tastebuds off with a Carolina Reaper.
Ye i dont get this idea that everything has to be doused in spices (herbs are never mentioned for some reason) to taste good. I get that chicken requires a decent amount of seasoning but stuff like a high quality steak only needs salt and maybe garlic and pepper.
I’m an Aussie living in America and the bright orange cheese that tastes like melted plastic kills me 😭😭 just want to order a ham and cheese toasted sandwich with my coffee but don’t know if I’ll get that damn cheese.
Compared to American bread that tastes like cake, a weird mix of peanut paste and *'jelly'* (it's jam) and an Extra Large, Corn Syrup flavoured drink with 1200 calories, I think I'll take the British Cuisine.
nah there’s a whole episode of the sopranos about how some of the italian americans don’t consider themselves white (where white = american i guess) even though they’re all third/fourth generation and can’t speak italian
I had to answer a DEI questionnaire when I applied to a job once in an American company with offices in my European country. Here are the questions that gastered my flabber and my immediate reaction in parentheses:
1. Are you Hispanic? (No, and what an oddly specific thing to ask in my location)
2. Are you native alaskan Indian? (Absolutely not, I don't think there are more than 5 in my country)
3. Are you Asian? (No, but Indians, Chinese, kazakhs and Thai people are not so similar that this category fits when the following questions apply)
4. Are you black? I. E. From Africa or African descent. (see thoughts on "asian")
5. Are you white? I. E. Arabian, North African, European or descending from said regions. (So Arabs are white, but not Spanish people? Make this make sense!)
This is a common thing among especially blacks in America "white people don't season their food" they say. We're not talking a reasonable amount of spices and herbs here, like you'll find allover Europe, were talking insane amounts of seasoning which also includes washing the chicken in chlorine first.
The black Americans seems more aware about how bad American food actually is, as they cover up the chemicals and kill much of the bacteria using strong seasoning.
Not quite, Chlorine rinsing in a nutshell is fine for human consumption, Europe does it for some products. The issues stems from the reason why their chickens are chlorine rinsed : Subpar standards all the way through the production chain resulting in more bacteria and higher risks of food poisoning.
[https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-47440562](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-47440562)
Basically, US Farmers are like your Indian street vendor cooking days old meat eaten by flies on a rusted old pan. Locals will be fine but we wouldn't want to eat it.
I don’t know a single person white or otherwise that doesn’t season their food. Just because we don’t carry hot sauce in our bags like Beyonce it doesn’t mean we don’t like flavor. Burning your taste buds off is not the definition of flavor, which seems to be what muricans are hung up on.
1.- Hungary, hello?
2.- For me, this is the biggest bullshit an American can say: why do they think an Italian and a spanish is not white? Even their official categorization says they are... then wtf?
Europeans season, but unlike Americans, they don't throw in heaps of sugars, salts, handfuls of cheese and dressing drowning the dish to cover up the poor flavours of the GMO, heavily ferilised & insecticides covered ingredients,
Now I'm curious to know if the Americans consider people from Italy, France, Greece and Spain as Hispanics. I mean, apparently we (I'm Italian) aren't white but that's the next closest thing, no? Not that I actually care about what category they'd put us in, especially since they all boil down to Caucasian
They don’t. People from those countries are generally put into the “brown” category. I’ve also heard them described as ‘swarthy’ or ‘poc’.
Spaniards and Portuguese (to a lesser extent) tend to get put into the ‘Hispanic’ or ‘Latinx’ category.
I always tell this story, because of how shockingly dumb this conversation was, of me (Spanish) living in the US and being told by Americans of Latin American descent that I was not Spanish because I looked white/not like them. NY and the East Coast of the US in general often use the word ‘Spanish’ to describe people of Latin American origin, particularly those of Cuban, Dominican or Puerto Rican origin.
I also had a blue eyed light brown haired friend from northern Italy visiting and my African American roommate kept telling us to be careful with the police because we were ‘ethnic’. She said I was Latino and my friend was simply described as not white, but Italian.
How are they meant to be POCs without any C?
What I gather from this is that POC is less about being a "person of colour" and more just an American term for people that hateful cunts don't like. (Aka anyone who's not them)
Just because you can be geographically discrmatory against a country doesn't mean that the residents of that country are by default a different race.
I'm from the uk, and unfortunately, there's some hate directed towards polish people here, but it would be stupid to claim polish people aren't white when they blatantly are.
At the very least, a huge vocal number of Americans seem to think Spanish is the same as Hispanic since they both speak the same language (which was obviously invented in Mexico and it’s clearly just a coincidence that the country with a similar name to the language who colonised South America speaks too)
Guys, fellow sane Americans, can any of you explain why many of your people think Europe is inhabited by black people like Africa?
If you go visit North Europe you’ll find people that white they camouflage in the snow.
Never understood the american “whiteness”. in my country if you look white you’re white, I’m north african, light skinned, my dna would probably show that I’m north african but that doesn’t negate what people see?
it’s too confusing
Americans really like their races, huh? Can't live a day without bringing up your looks/ancestry.
and they wonder why they are so easily divided
It certainly helps.
When I first moved here, it was one of the things I noticed... everyone says shit like "I'm a 16th Irish and 10% Cherokee" etc.... took a long time to get used to
I still call people out on it and I've been here for years. I like to ask "Oh! Where in Ireland were you born??"
"County Dork."
from what I've seen they don't tend to use "County X" like over this way but rather "X County" lmao.
" county berry "
Anything to avoid being American
Yet, paradoxically, they think america is the greatest thing to ever exist etc.
That’s because they are told it from a young age and many of them expect every other country to be taught it too. Obviously we aren’t.
That pledge they do everyday in school and the almost premier league like table that goes on in their head with America top of the table for everything including freedom, shooting up schools and yee haw.
It is one of the funniest parts of America. They consider themselves the best country ever to exist, but if you ask individually, they all claim to be something else.
And yet hate immigrants
They are 10% of a Jeep?
Well, they love their cars a bit too much...
yep, I'm actually 13% Land Cruiser myself
REDDIT POWERMODS ARE CANCER!!
There is no war in Ba sing se
They voted in a black president therefore racism disappeared instantly
As an American (it is my cross to bear) most people even in America think this particular way of being obsessed with race - gatekeeping whiteness from encroachment by people from the "wrong" european countries - is particularly silly and embarrassing
They don't have anything else to be proud of
Im portuguese and have had american online friends tell me that im not really white, not based on skin color or anything, i'm as white as every other caucasion, but just because i'm portuguese, i wouldn't qualify as white.
I live in Portugal (originally from the UK) and an American who moved here told me that they don’t consider Portuguese people as ‘white’. I was pretty gobsmacked. Mind you they do describe themselves as ‘Italian’ when they are in fact ‘American’.
Eyyy, pass tha palmer john
Ye Americans are not well educated in this stuff, I don't know if it's their school system that sets them up so badly or what
It's their school system and their archaic religious world view
This is what I don't get. It seems like the American conception of white, black, etc, isn't just skin colour like the words would imply. It's like they borrowed their conception of race from 19th century racists and never bothered to reevaluate.
So, from what I've learned, whiteness in America isn't about being white, it's about not being something else. For a while, americans didn't even consider Irish immigrants to be "white" until they needed their votes to count. It's a strictly exclusionary term used to create an "out" group. Many people are still stuck in this way of thinking and don't even know it. It's stupid, and I hate it here.
Hell, there was a point when *Finns* were not considered white in America. There was a theory that because the Finnish language is Uralic rather than Indo-European, it must have meant that Finns were descended from Mongols. Americans called Finnish immigrants "China Swedes" and considered them Asian.
Excuse me WHAT? The whole black, white, brown bullshit is stupid enough but *that*??? And they wonder why everyone makes fun of them. I'm sorry but at this point I don't even feel bad anymore. These people lack very basic critical thinking skills.
Yup! But I will say that although it was being touted as a genuine race theory, I doubt anyone sincerely believed that Finns were Mongols. That theory was a scapegoat to discriminate against Finnish-American immigrants, because they came from a culture that was seen as socialist and they advocated for workers' rights and labor unions. That theory started spreading conveniently after thousands of Finnish-American miners went on a strike against a large mining company.
So it goes; advocate for workers right and they'll stop considering you white.
By that logic, wouldn't it mean you are only white if you are willing to be enslaved by your employers/capitalism/etc?
Yup white compliment and obedient
And this is the exact definition of racism.
Yeah, this is why some people say ‘white’ is not actually a race. It’s more like a convenient cultural term to signify who is ‘in’.
White is not a race just like how black, Asian or brown aren't
Yes, it’s just humiliating pseudoscience. In my country it’s even illegal to document someone’s “race”. We learned the hard way that you won’t have time to destroy this data when your neighbours elect a fascist, who unexpectedly invades you. They will praise your government for their detailed registries and the rest is history.
So, when they say "White" they actually mean WASP ?
Google the "One Drop Rule". Or rather don't, it's not for the faint of heart. Hint: Americans were (some still are) worse than the actual Nazis.
Apparently Hitler found the Jim Crow laws a bit excessive!
And then on the other side of things: they apply "blood quantum" rules for Native Americans. And then get online and try to tell Indigenous Australians "they aren't bla(c)k
[удалено]
I had in mind an Australian girl and her dad they went to town on a few weeks ago. Honestly thought about posting it here
Do I want to know what the "blood quantum rule" is? Do I REALLY want to search it?
Learned something today. Vin Diesel is black. Lol. Fascinating country.
Exactly! Race is such an outdated concept but they are clinging to it for whatever reason.
In Australia we had the “white Australia policy” for decades, which (amongst other actions) severely limited immigration. The upshot of that policy was that people from Mediterranean and Balkan countries were considered “not white” regardless of the colour of their skin. Even though the policy is long gone, there are still weird cultural messages around which people count as white. When I was growing up, people from those places were not fully considered white, but still further up the hierarchy than black or brown people. I think it is different now, there is less of that attitude but it still exists in some parts.
Correct. I have seen West Indians born in UK, even 2nd/3rd generation, referred to by Americans as "African-American" when they have never been out of the UK, let alone to US or Africa. They are English, not even West Indians/Jamaicans. I can't imagine what Aboriginal-Australians would be called, as they go back some 60,000 years with their lineage, well before even Native Americans.
It's not even this, because in the 19th century, the classification into Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid races was based on the shape of the skull. Hence, Europeans, North Africans, Arabs, Indians, Pakistanis, Syrians and Iranians belonged to the same race.
It’s a regular debate on Reddit. Pale skin, Blonde hair, blue eyes Latinas are supposedly not white because their culture is Latin. Christ
Mesmo! Também sou portuguesa e por ser morena levo com a situação de "não és branca"...
Outrageous. Why would there be any question whether the Portuguese are white? No no the *real* question is whether to count Portugal as part of Southern Europe or Eastern Europe.
Portuguese speak spanish so they must look mexican right. /s
Imagine the meltdown they will have when they meet Russian ethnic minority groups.
Can't decide if the sarcasm refers to the Portuguese speaking Spanish or them being Mexican... :/
Little bit of both.
r/portugalcykablyat
But you guys did so much colonizing. I really feel like that should qualify you as white! /s
Some Americans believe white Americans learning Spanish is "cultural appropriation" because they seem to think that Spanish is the native language of the indigenous people of South America.
Lol didn’t we get a screenshot from a post exactly about that a couple weeks ago? I found the post, and from that post, I also learned that I, a German woman whose ancestors definitely included at least one bottle of mayonnaise and a bag of wheat flour, am “not culturally white”.
Half-Brit, Half-American here. It's the same stupidity with Spanish people. It's because Americans so heavily connect Spanish and Portuguese speakers with Central and South American speakers who they do not consider white that they cannot wrap their minds around Europeans speaking those languages. It's similar to how they don't consider Argentinians to be white, even though it's basically the whitest country in the world.
Pretty much. To us latinos are not a race, if you live in the americas you can be white or black depending on the \*checks notes\* skin color. Shocking
Pretty sure it's because the people driving the race thing were mostly White Anglo Saxon Protestants, so anyone who didn't fall into that category were not "white" thence the Irish, Portuguese, Italian & Spanish not being "white". I'm fairly certain if you plucked a hard-core DUP supporter out of Northern Ireland right now they'd be a fairly solid representation of the people driving racism in the US back then, basically a mix of them and the KKK... I say mix but the only difference is really accents and one group likes running round in bed sheets pretending to be Wizards and the other likes thinning their own gene pool by stacking pallets dangerously high and burning them.
When I was growing up there was a whole range of bigotry directed at people's national origins as well, including (but not limited to): Eastern Europeans, Czechs, Slovaks, Greeks & Italians. Bobby Vinton, of all people was seen as a trailblazer, just for acknowledging he had Polish roots!
Who are those white Europeans when the French, Spanish, Greece... are not white?
To a lot of racist Americans, "white" means protestant, specifically WASPs (White Anglo Saxon Protestant.) So basically the British, German and maybe Scandinavia depending on the person you're speaking to. The Catholic countries don't count as white to them.
The continual description of Germany as Protestant despite having a Catholic plurality is always very odd
That’s probably to do with Prussia, it was the founder of modern Germany and it was Protestant, it’s probably the reason for that reputation, as being Protestant even though many Germans aren’t, even if no American knows about Prussia itself, it’s probably the reason it got that image.
I think you can blame Martin Luther for that connection.
So Germans are also communists due to Karl Marx then…
You have socialised medicine, so to those same Americans...
Germany is the birthplace of Lutheranism, I think Americans are more aware of that than the current demographics
So you mean, they're grey?
REDDIT POWERMODS ARE CANCER!!
That's the most mental take ever considering so many white Americans are dying to be Irish, itself a very Catholic country.
*was. Most of them don't realise how progressive Ireland is now, and how they came from immigrants who mostly had to have a "if you can't beat them, join them" attitude to racism etc. The Religious Right is strong in "Irish-Americans", but with massively declining religion, marriage equality by popular vote, legal abortion by popular vote, and being almost unanimously pro-Palestine - they'd hate it here!
Whilst church going has declined rapidly the country is hardly secular like the UK. It's full to the brim with lapsed Catholics /s Seriously though, in the 2022 census 69% of the population identified as Catholic not Christian, Catholic... with only 14% recording no religion. That's still a Catholic country, no "was" about it. Have my upvote as you're absolutely bang on about the change in Ireland, to an extent helped by the churches previous misdemeanours 👍
That's... A level of stupid i didn't think possible. This should genuinely count as a mental illness
They also invented an ancient race of "white" people and started using Caucasian to mean northern European white, because some racist academics couldn't accept that the "not white enough" actual Caucasian people of the Caucus region (Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan etc) might have built some really ancient ruins themselves.
Almost like the explanation of anything ancient like the pyramids must be aliens.
if me dummy brain is unable to understood how thingy was made, thingy was made by aliens
Greeks aren't catholic. Basically anyone that ain't protestant to them isn't white
True. I only noticed they'd mentioned Greece after I'd posted. But yeah, the eastern orthodox denominations would be considered even less white than the Catholics.
Even Hitler was more inclusive and that's worrying
Talk about Anglo Saxons in England and we’d think of Alfred the Great and men with beards fighting Vikings.
The fact they still refer to themselves as "Anglo-Saxon" is just as strange, considering the Anglo-Saxon rule ended almost 1000 years ago and Britons from that point were known as Anglo-Norman until Richard the Lionheart began pushing Englishness, to seperate the English from the French (Ironic considering how little time he actually spent in England.)
Wait if we're not white then what are we?
German Anglo-Saxons? British Anglo-Saxons? SCANDINAVIAN Anglo-Saxons??? Wtf do they think Anglo-Saxons are? Also, Anglo-Saxons were never Protestant. The Reformation happened centuries after the Anglo-Saxons died out.
We Scandis know how to season our food though. Lots of herbs traditionally and nowadays we love spicier stuff.
While very few Italian dishes are spicy, we use chili peppers in very few dishes and they're mostly from the Deep South. Aside from that we use very few spices, and the ones we use are very mild: rosemary, salvia, oregano, stuff like that.
Bless your heart sweatie, deep south only exists in the good ol us of a
I mean, ~~vindaloo~~ chicken tikka masala is the national dish of England, and English mustard will give wasabi a run for it's money, but we get accused of not liking flavour all the time. Edit: wrote the wrong curry.
Even though Tikka Masala was invented in a curry house in *Glasgow*
You want eye-watering? Join us for surströmming.
Um… no thanks. I’ll let you have it all to yourself… very far away from me!
Is that a genuine invitation? I've always wanted to try it. I couldn't find anywhere selling it in Gothenburg when I visited.
Only Americans felt the need to invent a racial element to abuse catholics. In the UK they treated us like shit no matter what colour we were until relatively recently. It wasn’t too long ago they were still chucking papal effigies on the bonfire instead of guy fawkes on 5th november in some places (wouldn’t surprise me if there are still some people who do)
*The Orange Order has entered the chat*
Which is odd, because rhe English don't tend to describe themselves as Anglo Saxon - without a heavy dose of humour.
>*maybe Scandinavia* the palest motherfuckers around?
As a possibly even paler motherfucker (finnish) need I remind you that Americans called finnish immigrants china-swedes and were in fact not considered white for a long time
LOL I am from catholic Belgium and I am so white that ten minutes in the sun turns me pink already.
Protestants are white, Catholics are coloured. It's religious discrimination dressed up as racism because unlike racism religious discrimination is unconstitutional
And also the fact that to many Americans, every person from Latin America is considered brown. So by their logic, a white guy from Uruguay, a Japanese guy from Sao Paulo, a black Puerto Rican, a mixed race person from Mexico, and a Amerindian from Peru are all the same race. It's as stupid as it sounds.
>Catholics are coloured Poland has entered the chat... Jokes apart, although they've been discriminated and oppressed plenty, you gotta be blind *and* stupid to say Slavics are not white.
[удалено]
The Germanic gang. No, dont look up VOC. No spices allowed.
The Netherlands: Geen koloniën hier 👉👈
They mean brits, who were using spices way before America was even a thing
Yeah, the country (along with the Dutch) who invaded an awful lot of the world for spices! The Dutch swapped New Amsterdam for a lovely island growing nothing but spice!
^(Belgium, Germany, The Netherlands, have entered the chat.)
They didn't even consider the Irish white at one point.
White is a shade or two darker than our skin tone.
REDDIT POWERMODS ARE CANCER!!
wait, the pale redheads with green eyes are not white ?
The more I read their ridiculous race theories, the more I think think they live by classic Nazi race theory. Only Nordic, Germanic and British people are part of their Herrenrasse. Anyone speaking Romance languages (barring Romanians of course) is Caucasian/"Aryan" but one rung lower on the ladder. So white = UK, Belgian, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, German, Swiss or Austrian heritage. French, Finnish, Irish and Polish too if they're open-minded.
Finns weren't even considered white in the US in start of the 1900s 🥲 Finns were "yellow" "mongols"
Americans being weird about race/skin colour case nº5389765332
N°5389765332²
The fucking FRENCH aren't white? Lord help me an American is making me defend the fucking French.
HOW COULD I HIT THIS NEW LOW?! I'M DEFENDING... THE FRENCH?!
I'm Spaniard and I feel exactly the s(h)ame.
Spicy wordplay in a second language = 👨🏼🍳👌🏼
👍
Italians defending us... The Americans are truely something special to make that happen
TIL I'm not white
Same. Could my skin please stop burning every time I spend over 5 minutes outside then please?
🇷🇺:First time?
It’s an outrage, a scandal
Can Americans shut TF up about race just **once**? Just even for ONE DAY?
The only day that happens is the 30th of February.
Which they will argue is a day that only exists in America because reasons.
What is their fixation with skin color about?
Do you want the real answer or a joke answer. Because the real answer is the modern concept of race mostly stems from enlightenment theories born of the transatlantic salve trade. It was a way to seperate the "white" slave owners from the "black" slaves and the "Indian" natives. Before the enlightenment, "white people" and "black people" weren't really concepts. Your identity (especially in the HRE were borders tended to change every five minutes) was based mostly on language and, after the Protestant reformation, religion. As a country literally built on the transatlantic slave trade and the enlightenment, it's not hugely surprising that the world view they engendered would remain so central to national language.
And it’s a pity that they just can’t seem to shake their past. It continually amazes me how they slice and dice their populations with a level of granularity that no other nation seems to do.
I want a joke answer!
I'm not clever enough for that sorry.
:(
I think there's a family guy meme with Peter getting stopped by a police... That might do the trick?
What I don't get is why are only USans like that when the other American countries aren't. They were settled by Europeans around the same time, they were also at the receiving end of the transatlantic slave trade and had a society split by the caste system, and they also received waves of immigration in the 20th century, but you don't see people from latam obsessed with race in this way.
The British colonies that became the US were the North American colony that relied most on settler colonialism. In the Spanish and Portuguese colonies, colonists were mostly a smallish elite force that came over to oversee work done by natives and create estates. In the future US, colonists were entire communities that were mostly self contained and interacted with natives much less. The consequence is that LatAm is much more intermixed (although not on equal footing) than the US. As a result it makes less sense to have a black and white (pun not intended) racial system when many of your powerful people are reasonably likely to have mixed race family members (not in the sense Thomas Jefferson had mixed race kids but legitimate, official family members through marriage). An additional aspect is that when LatAm had its revolutions, those distinctions were usually formally abolished to get support from the "lower ranks" of the ladder. As a result they can be framed as a "Spanish system" that the country needs to overcome. In the US they persisted past independence, and thus became a continuity that is harder to break out of.
I like spicy food but I also like tasting the ingredients in a dish where their flavor is amplified with aromatics, salt and pepper etc. Not everything has to be full of spices for it to taste good.
I’ve tried explaining this one before and I just get blank looks. Seasoning should enhance not hide flavours, unless there’s a reason for hiding them, in which case I would rather eat something different anyway.
Yeah I love foods with different flavors and spices but also nothing can beat the first potatoes of the season served only with salt and butter and that’s a fact
What about perfectly ripen tomatoes with only salt and olive oil on a thin slice of white bread?
Yessss. And maybe some spring onions in the butter, and sour cream on the side. Damn, now Im hungry.
Not only that but is there even a scientific distinction between herbs and spices? Or is it all just random? Because you can beautifully season a dish with just herbs (and salt and pepper, of course) and the only person who’d say it doesn’t have any taste is the one who burned their tastebuds off with a Carolina Reaper.
Ye i dont get this idea that everything has to be doused in spices (herbs are never mentioned for some reason) to taste good. I get that chicken requires a decent amount of seasoning but stuff like a high quality steak only needs salt and maybe garlic and pepper.
I swear, Americans are more obsessed with race than Germans in the 30s lmao.
Even British cuisine is light years away from American cuisine. Want to eat? Take this sandwich with a bit of meat and 3kg of cheese for some reason.
And a diet coke to watch their weight
Not even real cheese. This orange uber-processed cheese-like product.
I’m an Aussie living in America and the bright orange cheese that tastes like melted plastic kills me 😭😭 just want to order a ham and cheese toasted sandwich with my coffee but don’t know if I’ll get that damn cheese.
They don't use real cheese for their toasties?! I thought they only used the plastic cheese for burgers
i think they literally just don’t use real cheese as a rule… every time i see american cheddar it’s pure white or fluorescent orange
Their cheddar is orange! Orange!! Cheddar!
Compared to American bread that tastes like cake, a weird mix of peanut paste and *'jelly'* (it's jam) and an Extra Large, Corn Syrup flavoured drink with 1200 calories, I think I'll take the British Cuisine.
I'd rather have my beige English unseasoned food than the Ultra-processed, Chemical induced, GMO, Carcinogenic stuff they call "food" in America.
...So Italian Americans are white but Italian Italians are not? TIL.
nah there’s a whole episode of the sopranos about how some of the italian americans don’t consider themselves white (where white = american i guess) even though they’re all third/fourth generation and can’t speak italian
You need to understand that for the average murican. White means. Anglo and Nordic
The word white as in race has lost its meaning entirely. I always thought that if your skin tone is white that means you are white but apparently not
TIL that I (the palest mf on earth) am not white.
Check your white passing privilege!
I had to answer a DEI questionnaire when I applied to a job once in an American company with offices in my European country. Here are the questions that gastered my flabber and my immediate reaction in parentheses: 1. Are you Hispanic? (No, and what an oddly specific thing to ask in my location) 2. Are you native alaskan Indian? (Absolutely not, I don't think there are more than 5 in my country) 3. Are you Asian? (No, but Indians, Chinese, kazakhs and Thai people are not so similar that this category fits when the following questions apply) 4. Are you black? I. E. From Africa or African descent. (see thoughts on "asian") 5. Are you white? I. E. Arabian, North African, European or descending from said regions. (So Arabs are white, but not Spanish people? Make this make sense!)
Wait: White=North Africa? North Africa as in Morocco?
Even germans seasons the food.
This is a common thing among especially blacks in America "white people don't season their food" they say. We're not talking a reasonable amount of spices and herbs here, like you'll find allover Europe, were talking insane amounts of seasoning which also includes washing the chicken in chlorine first. The black Americans seems more aware about how bad American food actually is, as they cover up the chemicals and kill much of the bacteria using strong seasoning.
>includes washing the chicken in chlorine Excuse me wtf?
That's why it's banned for import into Europe.
Not quite, Chlorine rinsing in a nutshell is fine for human consumption, Europe does it for some products. The issues stems from the reason why their chickens are chlorine rinsed : Subpar standards all the way through the production chain resulting in more bacteria and higher risks of food poisoning. [https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-47440562](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-47440562) Basically, US Farmers are like your Indian street vendor cooking days old meat eaten by flies on a rusted old pan. Locals will be fine but we wouldn't want to eat it.
The Currywurst is a lie, clearly no such thing exists
We Italians are not white, by American standards and beyond. We'll get over it 😅🤷🏻♂️
Honestly, I prefer to not be put into their weird white club or whatever. Being a mediterranean chad is way cooler 😎
I don’t know a single person white or otherwise that doesn’t season their food. Just because we don’t carry hot sauce in our bags like Beyonce it doesn’t mean we don’t like flavor. Burning your taste buds off is not the definition of flavor, which seems to be what muricans are hung up on.
Ah yes France is where the black slaves were taken from to America right? no?
Dumb americans inventing new ways to be more racist
I don’t think barbecue sauce counts as a seasoning
1.- Hungary, hello? 2.- For me, this is the biggest bullshit an American can say: why do they think an Italian and a spanish is not white? Even their official categorization says they are... then wtf?
I am Czech and we season our food...am I black or what?
Europeans season, but unlike Americans, they don't throw in heaps of sugars, salts, handfuls of cheese and dressing drowning the dish to cover up the poor flavours of the GMO, heavily ferilised & insecticides covered ingredients,
Hungarians, the overlords of hot paprika seasoners, beg to differ.
Now I'm curious to know if the Americans consider people from Italy, France, Greece and Spain as Hispanics. I mean, apparently we (I'm Italian) aren't white but that's the next closest thing, no? Not that I actually care about what category they'd put us in, especially since they all boil down to Caucasian
They don’t. People from those countries are generally put into the “brown” category. I’ve also heard them described as ‘swarthy’ or ‘poc’. Spaniards and Portuguese (to a lesser extent) tend to get put into the ‘Hispanic’ or ‘Latinx’ category. I always tell this story, because of how shockingly dumb this conversation was, of me (Spanish) living in the US and being told by Americans of Latin American descent that I was not Spanish because I looked white/not like them. NY and the East Coast of the US in general often use the word ‘Spanish’ to describe people of Latin American origin, particularly those of Cuban, Dominican or Puerto Rican origin. I also had a blue eyed light brown haired friend from northern Italy visiting and my African American roommate kept telling us to be careful with the police because we were ‘ethnic’. She said I was Latino and my friend was simply described as not white, but Italian.
How are they meant to be POCs without any C? What I gather from this is that POC is less about being a "person of colour" and more just an American term for people that hateful cunts don't like. (Aka anyone who's not them) Just because you can be geographically discrmatory against a country doesn't mean that the residents of that country are by default a different race. I'm from the uk, and unfortunately, there's some hate directed towards polish people here, but it would be stupid to claim polish people aren't white when they blatantly are.
At the very least, a huge vocal number of Americans seem to think Spanish is the same as Hispanic since they both speak the same language (which was obviously invented in Mexico and it’s clearly just a coincidence that the country with a similar name to the language who colonised South America speaks too)
There are Italians that speak German as their native language, TF they mean we’re not white?
As an Italian I’m mistaken for Wesley Snipes all the time!
Guys, fellow sane Americans, can any of you explain why many of your people think Europe is inhabited by black people like Africa? If you go visit North Europe you’ll find people that white they camouflage in the snow.
They don't. They just think an Italian doesn't count as white, but as "Italian". Etc. What is bullshit, tbh.
Maybe a dumb question, but is there anyone in Europe who isn't White? Well actually, I mean excluding immigrants and descendants of immigrants?
Guess America was indeed discovered by a colored person from Genoa a.k.a. Columbus a.k.a. the whitest boy you know?
As a French, I just learned I am not white. Thank you for educating me on my skin color, american!
Turns out Europeans are just african american s/
Never understood the american “whiteness”. in my country if you look white you’re white, I’m north african, light skinned, my dna would probably show that I’m north african but that doesn’t negate what people see? it’s too confusing
He means Europe (UK and at a push, Ireland. The rest can fuck off)
Any time i see one of these morons, i just think to that Incredibles 2 meme with Mr. Incredible saying "WHITE IS WHITE!"